1. Field of the Invention
The disclosure relates generally to device management methods and systems, and, more particularly to device management methods and systems that enhance the applicability of status messages returned in response to commands for device management.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, portable devices, such as handheld devices, have become more and more technically advanced and multifunctional. For example, a handheld device may have telecommunication capabilities, e-mail message capabilities, an advanced address book management system, a media playback system, and various other functions. Due to increased convenience and functions of the devices, these devices have become basic necessities of life.
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standardization body which develops open standards for the mobile phone industry. The mission of the OMA is to provide interoperable service enablers to work in different countries. The OMA Device Management (DM) protocol is a device management protocol specified by the OMA DM working group and the data synchronization (DS) working group. The OMA DM was created to support device configuration, software upgrade, and fault management functions, among others. The communication protocol in the OMA DM is a request-response protocol between a server and a client. Generally, the communication is initiated by the server, asynchronously, using any of the communication methods available such as a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) Push or SMS (Short Message Service). Once communications is established between the server and client, a sequence of messages can be exchanged to complete a given device management task.
In the OMA DM protocol, each client has a DM tree, and supports an Inbox mechanism. In the Inbox mechanism, a server can transmit a command to the client, such as requesting the client to add a management object (MO) in the DM tree. The server can use the “./Inbox” in the URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers) of the command target, and the client can decide where to put the MO in the DM tree at will. Based on the OMA DM protocol, a client can respond to the command with a status message with a status code 200 when a command is successfully executed. After the server receives the status message, the server can know that the MO has been added to the DM tree, but doesn't know the exact path for the MO created in the client. Since the server doesn't know the exact path for the MO, the server can use a “Get” command to get the specific sub-tree of the DM tree of the client. The additional “Get” command wastes communications and system resources, such as power, and causes users to be charged more for communications fees.